Monday, August 27, 2012

Just as fast as I can tweet this blog post to your smart phone, you'll know that the Federal Aviation Administration has heard the pleas of the digitally-obsessed, the always-want-to-be-connected and has taken the second step toward revising its ban on the use of personal electronic devices during critical phases of flight.

At the bar, specially created nightcaps had enticing names like; Up, Up and Away, Howard Hughes, The Earhart, and Wright on Track. Promotional material put out by the resort said these drinks were inspired by the desire to bring back the glamor days of air travel. (That a casino operator is longing for the romance of times past didn't come as much of a surprise; shorts and Hawaiian print shirts being the outfit of choice at most of them these days but that's another story.)

Monday, August 13, 2012

Outside of Australia and perhaps France, there has been
remarkably little attention paid to the very, very, very, near disaster that befell Qantas Airlines Flight 32 on
November 4, 2010. This, you will recall, was the Airbus A380 with 469 people on
board that suffered an uncontained engine failure shortly after takeoff from
Changi Airport in Singapore.

When the left wing of the world’s largest
passenger jet becomes a pin cushion for the flying shrapnel formerly known as a
Rolls Royce engine, it does gets all kinds of ugly.

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Son Joseph, 17, does have a tendency to introspection which explains why, 24 hours after we arrived in Italy after a trans-Atlantic flight on a UnitedBoeing 767, I heard him repeat back to me something that the flight attendant told him as he squeezed the armrests and fought with his fear that our plane would crash on takeoff and kill us all.